by Ben Shapiro
Minow’s speech was an early form of vanguardism—an elitist attempt to stump for “higher quality” programming that would “educate” the American public. At the time, the conservative executives largely ignored Minow—they were too busy catering to the wants of the American public and making big money by doing it. But the next generation of Hollywood executives, many of whom were also creative types from the advertising centers on Madison Avenue, began to take Minow’s criticisms seriously and made real attempts to balance entertainment and social messaging—for every Gilligan’s Island, there would be a socially oriented program like That Was the Week That Was. Hollywood thought that Americans would watch both shows, be entertained, and come away enlightened, too.
Unfortunately for the left, Americans wanted to watch entertaining shows, not shows geared toward political reeducation. As the 1960s progressed, and members of the television industry became more and more disillusioned with the American people’s lowbrow tastes, a solution presented itself to the television executives and creators: If they could merge lowbrow entertainment with liberal political messaging, they could have the best of both worlds—ratings and propaganda power.
It worked. Hollywood, with its godlike power, has succeeded far beyond its wildest dreams, shaping America’s styles, tastes, politics, and even family structures. That success left the next generation of Hollywood creators and executives bereft of causes; today’s television writers refuse to rebel against a political and cultural system they built. But they haven’t stopped propagandizing in primetime. Instead, they’ve shifted toward empty vanguardism and the promotion of sophisticated irony—at least until a new conservative bogeyman can be found.
Based on the testimony of hundreds of writers, producers, actors, and television executives—the most important figures in television over the last sixty years—it is abundantly clear that television has evolved from a medium for entertainment and advertising into a funnel for socially liberal messages. It is controlled by a small coterie of largely like-minded executives who are geared toward pleasing a like-minded cadre of advertisers who seek to cater to a like-minded corps of consumers. Content is provided by a like-minded clique of creative artists, who have generally studied under like-minded mentors and interact with like-minded colleagues. Everyone in Hollywood goes to the same restaurants, belongs to the same clubs, and sits in the same seats at Lakers games. Almost all of them think alike, too. Hollywood is still the land where dreams are made—but those dreams are increasingly the dreams of European-style progressives, who support and reinforce one another within their wealthy, cloistered bubble. The political and ideological purity in the television industry is almost awe-inspiring. Hollywood, in the cultural and democratic sense, is no longer American.
This isn’t to say that everything on television is liberal. That would be a ridiculous claim, unjustified by the evidence. Sports and history channels are apolitical, aside from the occasional Donovan McNabb controversy. And I’m not tackling the news media here—that subject has been exhaustively covered by the likes of Ann Coulter and Bernie Goldberg.
Even within the pure entertainment arena, there are shows that can be seen as neutral or conservative-leaning, shows that by their very nature seem to endorse the current social order. Many of these are crime procedurals that start with the premise that the criminal justice system works, that crime exists, and that basic social values have to be affirmed from time to time by violent means (think Hawaii 5-0, Blue Bloods, Cops, CSI, or Law & Order). Others are sitcoms that seem to promote family values, though those seem rarer and rarer these days. Reality television shows avoid politics more than scripted. Within those semi-conservative subsets of television, however, liberalism tends to paper over the conservative underpinnings, as we’ll discuss. The most conservative shows are those that provide a modicum of balance. By contrast, the most liberal shows ignore conservatism outright, or openly decry it as brutal, sadistic, racist, and homophobic.
What do the percentages look like in terms of political breakdown? Political content varies channel by channel, of course. Shows themselves vary episode to episode. In rough terms, however, primetime drama and comedy skew liberal the vast majority of the time on network television and nearly always on cable. Children’s and daytime television also typically skew liberal. Because there are so many shows, however, and because there is such high churn—shows premiere and are dumped within weeks in some cases—the better approach is to examine them one by one.
To that end, in the chapters that follow we will tackle the most influential and popular shows in television history, and examine them politically. I have, of course, been forced to pick and choose to a certain extent, though where I omit a major show I attempt to explain that omission. In no way should this listing be construed as complete—a full catalog of shows broadcast over the last sixty years can be found in the Encyclopedia of Television distributed by the Museum of Broadcast Communication, which runs some 3,000 pages.
Meanwhile, I would encourage liberal readers to focus on the broader point of my critique: the television industry is completely dominated by liberals, as even most liberals agree, including the television figures I interviewed. Many will admit that their liberal values seep into their work—and some openly boast of it. Most, however, refuse to acknowledge the clear evidence of discrimination against conservatives and conservatism within television. Instead, liberals within the industry typically offer three explanations for the leviathan bias of entertainment programming.
First, liberal creators, executives, and producers argue that their shows are not liberal, but rather realistic. Realism is a favorite buzzword in Hollywood—every great show must be “realistic.” Sandy Grushow, former head of the entertainment division at Fox television network, told me that shows like Married . . . with Children; The Simpsons; In Living Color; Beverly Hills, 90210; Melrose Place; Party of Five; and The O.C. “all spoke with a more realistic voice . . . as a culture, we seem to have a desire to express, to embrace, as we grow older as a country, that which feels more authentic. More honest. More real.”7 If The O.C. is “authentic,” then so are Pamela Anderson’s boobs.
In one sense, of course, all shows are realistic. That is because all comedies and dramas must be specific—they must revolve around a few characters involved in one plot and perhaps a subplot. Television is not a statistical study—it is by nature anecdotal. And it is not difficult to find anecdotes. Television creators can open the newspaper each morning, read a particular story, and base a plotline on that story. That plotline would clearly be realistic. What television’s executives and creators generally fail to recognize is that television acts as a magnifying glass—by focusing on one particular case among thousands, television inflates that case to gargantuan proportions. People assume when they watch television that if an event is shown on television, it must be representative of similar events—part of a larger social trend. Television creators know that. The question, therefore, is not whether their portrayals are realistic but whether that “realism” is broadly representative of the world at large.
This is where Hollywood creators and executives fall short. They pick realistic stories that often spring from their own daily lives. But their shows do not reflect the daily lives of those who watch them. Hollywood executives and creators disproportionately come from major urban areas that skew liberal, and so they mainly concern themselves with urban liberal themes. What they consider realistic will almost certainly vary from what a family of five in Birmingham, Alabama, would find plausible and familiar. There are many Wills and Graces and Ellens in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. There are comparatively few in Jackson, Mississippi, or Butte, Montana. But these liberal creators and executives suffer from chronic Pauline Kael syndrome—Kael, a film and television critic for the New Yorker, hilariously stated in the aftermath of Nixon’s trouncing of McGovern in 1972, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who
voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.” Those in Hollywood think they can “feel” those in Jackson or Butte or Birmingham. But for the most part they’ve never met them, and they certainly don’t agree with them.
The second, stronger argument leveled by Hollywood leftists is that their programming is not designed to be leftist—it simply responds to market conditions. This is the argument that people watch what they want to, and what they want to watch is liberal programming. This, of course, absolves television’s creative minds of any responsibility for what they put on the air. As Marta Kaufman, cocreator of Friends, one of the most successful and liberal shows of all time, told me, “Our feeling was always, if you don’t like what you’re watching . . . just turn it off.”8 Michele Ganeless, president of Comedy Central, told me the same thing: “The great equalizers are . . . the television ratings. People watch what they want to watch; nobody’s forcing them to watch television. So if it doesn’t appeal to someone’s sensibilities, they’re not going to watch it.”9
There is certainly support for this argument. The art of television is inherently intertwined with business. And that business is astonishingly profitable—the writers, producers, and executives I interviewed populate mansions and high-rise condominiums that would make Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon blush. There’s a reason everyone wants to get into “the biz.”
But the market argument makes one critical assumption: It presumes that producers, executives, and creators are all working in synchronicity to produce the products best suited for the market. There is no evidence that this is the case. In fact, the evidence points to precisely the opposite conclusion. As my study will reveal, Hollywood has jiggered the market to meet its own ends and has made America more liberal in the process.
The market to which Hollywood caters does not accurately reflect the market for television as a whole. People tend to forget that those in the television industry are not interested in ratings per se but in advertiser dollars. Every network must convince advertisers that its viewers are the most valuable. It does so by focusing on certain segments of the viewing public. Hollywood has, in fact, defined the market to which it caters—young, urban audiences—and then convinced advertisers on Madison Avenue that these audiences are worth more than other audiences. Television executives have made the case for decades that older people, rural people—people, in short, who trend conservative—are not worth as much in advertising terms as younger, hipper, wealthier urban consumers. The programming the industry produces therefore targets those audiences.
For example, suppose your show, starring Angela Lansbury, gets an 11 Nielsen rating and a 20 share (this means that 11 percent of all households with TVs were tuned in to your show, and that 20 percent of households watching TV at the time were tuned in to your show), and pulls in 12.6 million viewers, but only 4.5 million of them are age 18 to 49. A show starring Hilary Duff that gets 4.6 million 18-to-49 viewers may earn more than your show, even if it gets a 4 rating and an 8 share and only pulls in 4.6 million viewers total. The viewers have to be the right viewers—as defined by the liberals in the television industry, and their consumers in the ad industry. This is actually nonsensical—the evidence suggests that the focus on the 18-to-49 crowd has been entirely misplaced, and for both business and political reasons.
This strategy of narrowcasting—directing programming at a narrow segment of viewers rather than “broadcasting” at Americans as a whole—inherently leads to liberalism as well. The new television industry ideal is total fragmentation of the audience, with specially directed shows aimed at Dad, Mom, Billy, and Jane. This market-driven strategy has had wide-ranging social and political effects.
Once upon a time, Dad, Mom, Billy, and Jane used to sit together and watch Sing Along with Mitch. Family cohesion seemed to grow. Then television began targeting Dad, Mom, Billy, and Jane separately. Families stopped watching TV together. Family time turned into individual time. Family interests became individual interests. Dad, Mom, Billy, and Jane were compartmentalized. The splintering of viewership meant the separation of family members from one another in terms of viewing habits. In Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, the political scientist makes the case that our “social capital” is disintegrating—that as a society, we are becoming less communal, more atomistic. In large part, he blames television, which we are increasingly watching alone rather than with family. “[D]ependence on television for entertainment is not merely a significant predictor of civic disengagement,” Putnam writes. “It is the single most consistent predictor that I have discovered.”10 It is also likely to be the single most significant predictor of family disengagement, now that we have discarded family viewing for targeted viewing patterns.
Breaking apart family viewing meant more than simply fracturing family time; it meant treating each individual member of the family as an adolescent, free of care and responsibility. Targeting Dad qua Dad meant producing a very different show than targeting Dad as a member of a family audience. Dad qua Dad probably watches Spike TV and enjoys sports, violence, and boobs, whereas Dad as family member probably likes Bill Cosby. Mom qua Mom watches Sex and the City rather than identifying with Debra Barone. Without Mom and Dad there, Billy’s probably watching MTV. And Jane is in the other room, checking out what’s on CW. Everyone is turned into an adolescent, their particular needs and desires catered to. Family roles are thus undermined by the compartmentalized consumption of television.
The role of the father on television provides a particularly illuminating example. When television shows were broadcast, fathers were portrayed as responsible heads of households who cared for their wives and children and put bread on the table. Think Father Knows Best. That’s because fathers wanted to be seen this way, mothers wanted to see their husbands this way, and children wanted to see their dads this way.
Soon, however, the television industry began targeting younger audiences. Unsurprisingly, the result was Archie Bunker and All in the Family, where the father figure still had some residual authority but no real authority; he was a benighted bigot constantly bested by his more tolerant and cleverer son-in-law. This image of fatherhood fell into line perfectly with young adults’ perceptions of fathers—old fashioned and close-minded—flattering young people’s sensibilities. Archie was given just enough humanity—and made midfifties—to avoid alienating young dads and moms, who could identify more with Meathead and Gloria than Archie and Edith.
Later, marginalized forces within the television industry began targeting even younger audiences, whom they felt they could then pipeline into more mature programming. That led to Fox’s The Simpsons, where Homer Simpson became the adolescent’s picture of the father: moronic, abusive, drunk, foolish. By narrowing the audience further and further, TV’s iconic fathers were tailored to those increasingly small targets—and the chain from responsible adult to grown-up teenager was made complete, both on television and in the American mind.
Even if the market is properly calculated, and we leave aside the normative argument that fragmentation of programming destroys family viewing and undermines the family structure, there is no evidence that a variety of programming is being provided. The majority of it emanates from one side of the political aisle. In fact, when quasi-conservative programming hits the airwaves, it often blows out liberal programming. Yet in their monomaniacal quest to push the envelope for status and reward, everyone looks for the next Friends, not the next Cosby Show; everyone seeks out the next Will and Grace, not the next Everybody Loves Raymond. Everybody wants to do an updated All in the Family; nobody wants to do an updated Waltons. As for the tough-on-terrorists action show 24—let’s just say that it died the moment Janeane Garofalo entered the set.
But liberal market-manipulation goes well beyond programming choices. Liberals in television actually corrupt the market by working with nonmarket entities to gain special advanta
ges. They regularly cater to government, which can guarantee them special favors, and liberal interest groups, which can push government to do so. As we will show in a subsequent chapter, television executives work hand-in-glove with both government officials and interest groups in a relationship that can only be described as a Celluloid Triangle. Executives and creators are careful not to offend groups that can organize boycotts, unless those groups are conservative; executives and creators are careful to cultivate liberals in Washington, who provide them with massive tax benefits and kickbacks. FCC regulation has almost always cut in a liberal direction, since the FCC is only active when it violates the First Amendment by cracking down in the name of “diversity” and the “public interest.”
Television is a complex industry. It should accordingly respond to business forces just like any other. But just like the music, publishing, and news industries, it has become old, archaic, set in its ways. It therefore refuses to contemplate unorthodox notions about the value of conservative viewers, older viewers, rural viewers, and the distorting role of government. And so its programming leans left as a business matter, too, not a purely creative one.
Television creators’ third argument justifying liberal domination of television is that liberals are simply more empathetic, creative, and talented than their right-wing counterparts. This argument is obviously disgustingly discriminatory. Few Hollywoodites admit this sort of xenophobia openly—that could be grounds for a lawsuit—but it exists in precisely the same way that racism dominated American companies during the Jim Crow era. The reason companies weren’t hiring blacks, argued the racists, was that blacks were unqualified, incapable of performing well at their jobs. Today, the xenophobes argue that conservatives aren’t getting jobs in Hollywood because they are plodding rubes who crib their scripts from old episodes of Leave It to Beaver.
